Tailor Made: Chinatown's Last Tailors (2008)

Octogenarian brothers Bill Wong and Jack Wong have owned and operated Modernize Tailors in Vancouver's Chinatown for sixty of the business' ninety year existence. Despite having engineering degrees, they decided on taking over the family business, started by their father, out of circumstance. In its heyday, Modernize, once the largest tailor shop in the city, had twenty employees, but now in an era of buying clothes off the rack, it is down to a staff of two, a coat maker and a pant maker, both who have been with the company for fifty years. In their advanced ages, Bill and Jack have to decide what to do with the business, they neither wanting it to die with them or having a family member take it over out of family pressure, without a want or aptitude of tailoring. And as one interviewee states, the number of tailors that are born in the city every year (to take over the business) is zero. Regardless, Bill and Jack's younger more famous businessman/philanthropist brother Milton Wong has purchased the property across the street, the business' original site, for the brothers to live in retirement with a small storefront which they can use to continue a hobby business or to sell to whomever might want to buy the business. Currently, there are three potential roads Modernize could go after they move. One, the only guaranteed of the three but the least desirable, is that the business can fold whenever Bill and Jack decide to retire. Two, local part-time fashion reporter, J.J. Lee, a faithful customer and an architect by training (a career which he has not pursued), has expressed a desire to apprentice with the brothers only to take over the business if he shows a true aptitude in tailoring, that aptitude which is not a certainty. Or three, David Wilkes, the tailor at the local outlet of upscale Holt Renfrew, also a faithful customer, has also expressed a possible interest in taking over the business, especially if imminent job prospects with tailors in London's Savile Road, arguably the center of upscale menswear in the world, do not come to pass. The issues with two and three are that they are only expressions of interest, and that J.J. and David, while having their hearts with Modernize, may not see the business as being a true practicality in their lives.